I'm Writing and I Can't Shut Up

Tag Archives: Emily Skillings

Having lived so long without one, we forgot
what a basement felt like—how it seemed
to the carrier(s), to the inhabitant(s),
the structure(s), that there was an underneathness
to all that daily interaction and exchange—
i.e. an empty teacup hovering just above a pool.

Welcome to another round of “Karen doesn’t have a clue about how poetry works (but that doesn’t stop her from blogging about it)”.

Let’s start with the teacup above a pool. To me, a teacup is a strong symbol of social propriety and decorum, linked to the Queen, delicate sandwiches, formal luncheons intended primarily to show off new hats. A teacup is fragile, merely a swirl of porcelain in space, as opposed to a coffee cup which is solid and practical. I’m not saying that’s what a teacup actually is, just what it brings to mind. Then there’s the pool below, with its unknown depths and shifting surface, a place where one could dive in or drown, who knows which.

Then there’s the basement. All houses have foundations, but a basement is something else, a hollow in a foundation, where old junk or dormant ideas are stored, a place that can become another room someday when the time is right or just stay a spidery place for laundry machines and boxes of the past.

My family moved from New England to South Florida when I was a kid; we lost our basement along the way. A house with a basement feels different, at least the houses I’ve been in. The floors echo. And there’s always something else, something unseen, beneath. In metaphorical terms, this could be viewed as positive or negative – it’s great to have a sense of where one came from, to have space for future memories, but doesn’t memory also limit our expectations? And did I mention spiders? And sump pumps? – but it seems to me the poem treats it as positive, keeping a vibrant, energetic tone throughout.

I get the general idea of being without a basement as being without that extra, out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage, and the installation of a basement as expansion of the capacity for memory, for depth of experience. The installation itself is whimsical and fun: of course, basements aren’t installed in this way (I know nothing about construction, but I suspect it’s not possible to install a basement under an existing house). Ten women arrive to install it. Why women? Because women tend to keep family memories more than men? Why ten? The number required for a minyan? A sufficient generational span to warrant a basement of the past?

Alternate take, based on a true story: When I was a mere lass of 19 or so, I made some self-deprecatory remark and a friend answered, “You know what bothers me about you? Your abasement.” I spent a couple of beats trying to figure out why I was a basement before it clicked. I don’t think that’s anywhere in the text of the poem, but every reader brings a different past – a different basement, if you will – to a read, and that’s mine for this one. I tried reading the poem in that light, in fact. A poem about installing abasement would be a very different poem, wouldn’t it? Darkness, underneath the pink (I’m still haunted by “The Spring Forecast” from a few weeks ago) and the we and the freed collection? Is this a poem about the erosion of confidence that comes, for so many girls, at puberty? Is the substory that comes at first blush of waking sexuality a sense of shame, of a new context in every social exchange? And again I’ve fallen into some super-subjective abyss. Give me a minute to climb out…

Then I have formal questions. Why three sets of six lines plus a couplet, enjambed with the last sestet? Does trochaic pentameter (if that’s what it is; I have some congenital inability to accurately parse meters, especially when they are just a bit irregular, as they are here and in most modern poetry) add some level of meaning? What function does this serve? Must it serve a function, whether aesthetic or symbolic? And semantic questions: Why the (s)s in the first stanza? To me it adds to the whimsy, maybe just because it looks like smiles, but is there a deeper, more poetically valid reason? And that last line: while keeping the importance of time forefront (it was again again), the whimsicality of the poem stretches to another level, almost to wordplay with “Leave no stone already.” There’s a confusion of past and present, but why end on that switch? To confound the past’s role, now strengthened by the basement, in expectations of the future?

This is why I get so frustrated with poetry: significance of any element varies from poem to poem. I’m going to stick with what grabs me – the teacup and the basement and the pink and the ten strong women and foundational memory, background, context (oh, but I do so love the abasement angle, it followed me home, I promise to feed it every day, can I keep it, please, please?) – until I learn a better way to read.

In her On Poetry podcast episode, Skillings (a Columbia teaching fellow and MFA candidate) mentions she’s only been paid for two poems. “No one goes into poetry for money anyway,” says host Gabriela Garcia. Same could be said for all that’s important and irreplaceable. Her first full-length collection, a compilation of her work over the last four years (including this poem) will be released this Fall.